Customer Reviews

The Franklin Report, New York City 2002: The Insider's Guide to Home Services

5 star:		(8)
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Once you discover this book, you wonder how you ever lived without it. It fills a real need for any homeowner or renter who will ever need to find a professional to fix up their home or just to fix (repair, clean, install, redo) something in it. I got my Franklin Report a few weeks ago and already have answered a desperate friend's cry for help about who to call to get a dining room chair fixed in time for a Christmas dinner. The book is surprisingly entertaining, and has an informative section for each specialty that helps in choosing a service provider and negotiating the work agreement. It also has that all-important but very hard-to-find information about pricing.

Every home should have a copy. I'm giving it to my friends for Christmas this year. I know they will thank me!

This first rate book not only provides authoritative guidance on household services, it also provides very practical and informative advise on how to deal with the service providers and scope out the jobs involved. To have a rating for all relevant aspects of a renovation/price, quality and reliability, makes this effort very instructive.

This is truly a welcome compendium for New York City dwellers.

I have often wondered why this guide did not exist. You select a restaurant, you have a guide, you select a hotel, you have a guide -- you select an electrician and you end up with the guy with the biggest ad in the Yellow Pages. By definition, the guy with the biggest ad also is probably the most expensive -- he needs to work at least two jobs a day to pay his Yellow Pages bill.

This book finally give the consumer a leg up -- separates the pros from the inept. The research is top rate -- who does all this leg work? Certainly will become the bible -- now if only they will do a guide for my summer house locale. . .

An incredibly valuable resource--like the Zagat's of home services. This book pulls together a wealth of information about all kinds of home service people in the NYC area--from architects to exterminators. As a new homeowner, it has saved me hours and hours of searching and compiling my own information--it's all organized here in this well-designed and user-friendly book. I've already found a few leads for an electrician, and I plan to use this book as my ultimate guide for home renovation. A brilliant concept!

The really reports the "word of mouth" view that I have always hoped and wanted someone to publish. I had a great experience with a few of the vendors in this book and they got it just right. Conversely, I had the worst experience of my life with a completely incompetent contractor and they hosed him. What a service!

I became addicted to the 1st edition of this guide book last Christmas. A temperature check of interior design and architecture, and an unrivaled resource for the more mundane (however talented) window washers and plumbers -- The Franklin Report offered good sport and hard information. So I was pleasantly surprised to find a brand spanking new NYC edition has hit the stands. The most noticeable difference this year is that the understated almost medical-journal like cover has been replaced by an equally elegant yet more consumer friendly facade. I liken it to the new twenty-dollar bills. Inside, the book is about a hundred pages longer, including an index that makes a name-search a million times easier. To my delight, every entry has been rewritten and customer comments expanded. And while the design establishment pantheon hasn?t been rewritten, every category in the report offers some great new finds to choose from. Looks like I picked the wrong year to stop studying up on designers!

Thanks!

This book is an exceptionally user-friendly and comprehensive guide to the universe of home services that a New York City dweller needs to survive. So often, one has a service need but simply cannot go beyond one or two unqualified word of mouth recommendations to select an appropriate provider. And even when one gets a recommendation, a feature of the service may be left out - the recommender may not, for example, want to disclose how much he or she paid. To have a book like The Franklin Report, which rates all relevant aspects of a provider and which furnishes specific statements about a particular job, is invaluable. I can't recommend it more highly.

Why someone didn't think of this 100 years ago, I'll never know. Before making a 5-7 figure investment in your home, you'll never spend [your money]wisely.